]]>Life-logging is not a new idea. Steve Mann has been working on it since the 1980s, as has Gordon Bell since the 1990s. Just two months ago, a Microsoft patent application showed how Redmond is trying to capitalize on its years of research in the field of computer-assisted life-recording, and Google clearly has similar applications in mind with Project Glass.

One of the big issues with the concept is the size and wearability of the recording device, which is why an upcoming product from a Swedish company called Memoto is so exciting. They launched a Kickstarter project earlier today and achieved their $50k goal within five hours. At the time of writing they had almost doubled that amount, and are now into a $150k stretch goal phase where backers will get to choose a new colour for the postage-stamp-sized device.

Here’s Memoto’s Kickstarter video:

According to Memoto CEO Martin Källström, who was previously head of the blog search engine Twingly, the company has already benefited from a €500k seed round from Passion Capital and angels such as Amen CEO Felix Petersen. That was enough to start paying the Memoto team – now the Kickstarter cash will see the device become reality.

Not only that: Källström also sees the Kickstarter success as validation for the idea ahead of a Series A round this winter.

How does it work?

The Memoto device measures 36x36x9mm and contains a five-megapixel camera, a GPS unit, an accelerometer and 8GB of storage – enough for two days’ worth of photos, seeing as the device takes a photo every 30 seconds. It will cost $279, or nothing for early backers who give $199 or more.

The user will need to hook the device up to their computer every couple of days, both to upload the photos and recharge the battery. The photos will go onto Memoto’s servers and be made accessible for time-lapse-style playback through smartphone apps.

Crucially for security, the photos will be encrypted and inaccessible even to Memoto’s analytics systems while the user is not logged in. During that log-in time, Memoto’s systems will be able to pick out key frames that represent “moments”, for example the four hours where the user is sitting in front of their computer – these are the frames that will be shown when the user is trying to sift through everything they did on a certain day.

The company reckons each device will generate 1.5TB of data a year (although they will of course be able to delete what they don’t want to remember). Users will pay an annual subscription for the photos’ storage, providing Memoto with a second revenue stream on top of device sales.

“If there weren’t a customized storage service available, it would be a big problem for everyday consumers to keep all the data on-hand in a safe and secure way,” Källström told me.

Keeping memories alive

So, what happens if the user falls on hard times and can’t keep up with their subscription fees? Would that mean the digital equivalent of losing your memory?

“We see that the photos we are storing will be very valuable data and we will do everything to make sure that no mistakes or unfortunate circumstances will cause any data loss,” Källström said. “There will be three ways to get the data down from our storage service: you can download individual images through the app interface in full resolution, you can download in bulk, and there will also be an API where third-party developers can build their own lifelogging apps.”

And what about those patents? Källström reckons the idea of a wearable camera is now well-established enough that there are “no patents hindering new applications in that space”.

Hopefully he’s right. What we’re looking at here is a realization of Microsoft’s old SenseCam project, made realistic – if still a bit pricey – for consumers. Even Gordon Bell is quoted in Memoto’s press release as endorsing the thing.

“A small, wearable, geo-aware camera with pictures going to the cloud is just what we need for life-logging of life’s events. I’m anxious to try the Memoto camera,” Bell said.

High praise indeed – now Memoto just needs to live up to those expectations. We’ll see after the commercial launch early next year.

]]>As the concept of ‘social’ evolves, many startups are trying to tame it by creating a solid wall around what’s meant to stay private. That’s the thinking behind social networks such as Path and, to a more extreme degree, Pair.

More recently, we can look to Quilt and Everyme (which picked up a couple million in funding last week) for fresher examples of private social networking efforts. Both of those go heavy on the photo-sharing aspect, but now there’s a new startup out of Berlin that’s concentrating entirely on that angle.

7moments, which is all about private collaborative photo albums and nothing more, has a solid heritage. CEO Stefan Kellner was a co-founder of Plazes, along with Felix Petersen, now chief at the much-hyped Amen. That service was sold to Nokia in 2008 and recently shuttered.

Plazes was somewhat ahead of its time, being a Foursquare-anticipating location-based services app at a time when smartphones weren’t all toting mobile broadband and GPS. But the time certainly seems ripe for what 7moments is doing.

“I did a hiking tour in Nepal, and there was no service that allowed people to all put their photos in one place and do something with it,” Kellner told me. “We could have several Flickr accounts and pool it, but that wasn’t feasible because people were so heterogeneous and I didn’t want to force them into something. So I then decided we should build something to do that.”

The service is available as a web app and on the iPhone. You can invite people to an album by email, and can also import photos from and export them to Facebook.

Part of the attraction of 7moments’ approach is the fact that it doesn’t involve trying to segment groups of friends out of a larger pool – users need to be invited to each album, which pretty much removes the need for management. As CPO Markus Angermeier puts it, each album effectively becomes a tiny social network of its own.

The service went into beta earlier this year with a strong focus on event albums, but, according to Kellner, the response led the team to also think in terms of continuous photostreams for set groups of friends. In terms of other features, there’s no tagging (why would there be in small, private groups?) but users can like and comment on photos.

I think this idea has something going for it. Most people I know have had new-social-network fatigue for some time, and juggling the privacy settings around groups of friends on the existing networks is a pain.

When it comes to private photo albums, there’s real value in having stripped-down, singleminded, virality-free functionality. It makes for a clean and accessible user experience.

The trick, of course, will be in keeping it clean. Kellner says various monetization strategies are being considered, including analysis tools to tell the user which of their photos are good, and a possible shift into real paper photo-album printing.

I’ll confess: when Amen’s first version launched last September, it didn’t grab me. It’s a tool that lets people say that something is the best or worst something ever (“Pizza is the best food ever”, “Nickelback is the worst band ever”, etc) and, while the plan to build up a very valuable reputational database is interesting, I found the mechanism itself fun… but a bit dumb.

There are four major feature boosts coming. Posts can now be accompanied by photos and can also be commented on. On top of these elements of engagement, the app’s becoming a lot easier to use: it will now auto-suggest both Facebook friends and music tracks (using iTunes as the database) as users compose their posts.

Interestingly, the Facebook and iTunes integration is two-way: Amen says Facebook approached it to fast-track its posts into the Timeline and Open Graph, while each music track that gets mentioned becomes available as a 30-second preview and potential iTunes purchase.

“We feel now it has everything in it we wanted for launch — we were very quick in getting it out because we wanted feedback, but now it feels like it’s complete,” CEO Felix Petersen told me. “It shows up much better the value of the aggregated data when you know you can click on any object and get a description around it.”

Petersen said his favourite new feature is the addition of pictures. He stressed Amen wasn’t becoming a picture-sharing app as such, but noted that “if you say it’s a ‘best poodle ever’, it’s so much more fun if you can add a picture of that poodle.”

One spot of bad news, however, is that Amen’s turning off the ability to post to the service from the web. Petersen said this was for the same reason it doesn’t have an Android version yet, and won’t for the foreseeable future –- the company is focusing purely on iOS right now.

“We just want to concentrate on one platform to make sure we do it right,” he said.

Amen’s team have pedigree. Petersen’s the guy who founded and sold to Nokia the social mapping service Plazes. CPO Caitlin Winner also hails from Nokia and the MIT Media Lab, and CTO Florian Weber was Twitter’s first developer.

The company also has quite an impressive roster of investors, including Ashton Kutcher’s A Grade fund, Soundcloud founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, and Index Ventures.

Alongside the upgraded app, Amen’s also announcing that it has picked up new backers in the form of Sunstone Capital (whose $1m takes the seed round up to $2.9m), and Path CEO Dave Morin, through his Slow Ventures vehicle.